Abstract
In this article, I examine Frankenstein and A Christmas Carol to depict pathological male grief and its relation to larger cultural and economic systems. The lenses brought to this endeavor are pastoral and psychoanalytic. By pastoral, I mean, generally speaking, the ways faith and care are manifested in relationships and are, therefore, integral to the reality of grief and mourning. More specifically, male pathological grief reflects distortions of both care and faith. In terms of a psychoanalytic lens, I rely on depictions of psychological defenses, unconscious motivations, and an altered version of Christopher Bollas’s notion of transformational objects to depict and understand the psychopathology of Victor Frankenstein’s and Ebenezer Scrooge’s grief.
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Notes
I am grateful to Jaco Hamman for pointing out that William Worden did not attend to the phenomena of chronic sorrow, which is certainly becoming more prominent when we encounter the ongoing losses associated with climate change. This article does not address chronic sorrow, in part because the two literary figures do not represent chronic sorrow. Instead, they represent maladaptive responses to loss.
Care is a seemingly mundane concept, but it is deeply complex and contested. For the purposes of this paper, I will use the following definition of care: care is everything we do to help individuals, families, communities, and societies to (1) meet the vital biological, psychosocial, existential, and spiritual needs of individuals, families, and communities; (2) develop or maintain basic capabilities with the aim of human flourishing; (3) facilitate participation in the polis, and (4) maintain a habitable environment for the common good of all (LaMothe, 2018, p. 8). I add to this definition that care and pastoral care as political concepts necessarily involve shared critical and constructive reflection on how the structures (and their accompanying narratives and practices) of the state, governing authorities, and non-state organizations (e.g., businesses, labor unions, religious and secular communities) and actors meet or fail to meet the four features of this definition of care.
H. Richard Niebuhr (1989) and other theologians (e.g., Freis 1984; Rahner, 1984) argue that faith is constitutive to being human. Faith is, therefore, an anthropological category and not simply or solely a religious category. I find that Niebuhr’s depiction of faith in terms of interrelated dialectical pairs, namely belief-disbelief, trust-distrust, loyalty-disloyalty (I add hope-hopelessness) is helpful in understanding the pre-representational dynamics of faith in early childhood, as well as later, more complicated symbolic constructions.
The term “pre-representational” means that the pre-symbolic infant is not able to form or use representations of objects. Winnicott (1971) used the term “environmental mother” to refer to just this. Bollas’s (1987) notion of transformational objects is similar to Winnicott’s view, though he focuses more on process vis-à-vis pre-representational. This said, it is important to stress that pre-representational does not exclude the infant’s semiotic capacities to organize experience. Charles Sanders Peirce (1991, 1998) makes clear that semiotic processes operate prior to more complicated symbolic processes. So, we can say that an infant organizes experience, at this stage of development, semiotically, though without the capacity to form and use representations.
Donald Capps (1997) examined the lives and works of William James, Erik Erikson, Carl Jung, and Sigmund Freud, arguing they had a disposition toward melancholia, which, Capps believed, had roots in their early psychosocial development. The early felt loss of their mother’s attention and affections shaped their stance and interest in religion. Melancholia, then, can be viewed as an inability or unwillingness to mourn. My interest, however, is not to confine problems in mourning under the rubric of melancholia.
Phillip Wade (1976) argues that Mary Shelley’s choice of the name “Victor” comes from her reading of Paradise Lost, wherein God is named “The Victor.” In her story, Victor is playing God. Victor uses science to re-animate the dead, which is another way of considering resurrection as the overcoming of (victory over) impermanence and vulnerability.
One could say that Victor has confused “life” with living. His preoccupation with his idol interferes with his living—finding meaning, care, and fidelity in everyday relations.
Mary Shelley’s depiction of the grandiosity, melancholia, and bursts of energy followed by depression all indicate the diagnosis of manic-depressive or bipolar illness. While this illness is a factor in Victor’s failure to mourn, I am focused less on mental illness as the cause.
Bollas acknowledges that the infant cannot yet differentiate between this or that object in the earliest phase of infancy. He views the “object” as pertaining to the process of parental caring and the infant’s pre-representational organizations of this process.
Scrooge’s name came from a tombstone Dickens had seen on a visit to Edinburgh. The grave was for Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, whose job was given as a meal man—a corn merchant; Dickens misread the inscription as “mean man.” Ebenezer Scrooge, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebenezer_Scrooge, accessed September 3, 2019.
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LaMothe, R. Male Pathological Grief in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: A Pastoral Psychological Perspective. Pastoral Psychol 72, 845–861 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-023-01068-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-023-01068-w